Ezra Koenig: Writing for Kanye Influenced Vampire Weekend’s New Album

Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig has given another interview about the band’s forthcoming album. He discussed how writing for Kanye West initially made him want to get “200 people” working on the new Vampire Weekend album. “Increasingly that seems like that’s the way that people work,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s not just pop; that pop way of working starts to encompass the whole music industry.” His introversion got the better of him, though. “At the end of the day, the people I’ve ended up enjoying working with are the people I already knew.”

Among those co-conspirators was Rostam Batmanglij, who departed the band in 2016 to focus on his solo work. Koenig said his former bandmate worked on a handful of tracks. “We have some stuff that we started a pretty long time ago,” he said.

As for the album’s sound, a Kacey Musgraves concert Koenig attended last September inspired him to change his songwriting approach. “The music was really clear and her voice was really clear,” he said. “I’m the type of person who has spent hours poring over the avant-garde poetic lyrics of certain songwriters, and there was something that felt so good [about how] from the first verse, you knew who was singing, who they were singing to, what kind of situation they were in. After the show I realized there’s not a ton of Vampire Weekend songs where you could listen to the first verse and immediately answer the question of who’s singing and who are they singing to.”

In September, Koenig said Vampire Weekend’s new album was 80% done. No release date has yet been set. Their last full-length album, Modern Vampires, came out in 2013.